IN NOVEMBER, 2008 this column highlighted St Chad’s Cathedral as a fine day out in its own right, and not just as a place of worship.

I pointed out how the downstairs Romanesque crypt was ‘a must see, if only to appreciate ambitious £1 million plans to turn a dozen or so bays and chapels into an Education and Heritage Centre with refreshments’.

Alas, the appeal was hit by the recession.

But now there’s a new reason for visiting what is correctly known as The Metropolitan Cathedral and Basilica of St Chad Birmingham. And that’s the launch of The Birmingham Pugin Trail, designed to capitalise on the March 1, 2012 bicentenary of the birth of Augustus Welby Pugin, the ‘greatest 19th century architect, designer and writer’.

The other sites on the trail with direct and/or associated Pugin links include King Edward’s School New Street (demolished in 1936 when it should more or less have been celebrating its centenary!), St Mary’s College Oscott, St Mary’s Convent, Handsworth, Erdington Abbey and St Joseph’s Church Nechells.

It’s an impressive catalogue of local work and influences for a man born in Bloomsbury, London – and whose other achievements include the Palace of Westminster, the Big Ben clock tower, the interiors of the House of Lords and the Catholic Church of St Giles, Cheadle. Especially as Pugin died aged just 40 on September 14, 1852.

The most astonishing thing I learned during our latest visit to St Chad’s was that the city council was ready to demolish it in favour of the 1960s’ Queensway inner ring road.

Saving the cathedral explains the sharp kink in the tunnel nearby and why traffic noise can be heard in the crypts closest to it.

The official Pugin Trail brochure, available from the cathedral, points out how ‘Pugin taught that architecture, society, morality and faith are all interconnected, and that the finest buildings can only be raised when the society from which these buildings emerge is equally fine’. Hmmm....

Yet today it’s almost impossible to get a decent photograph of St Chad’s exterior. If it’s not street lamps, road signs or traffic lights in the way, there are buildings like The Thistle Hotel, the Kennedy Tower or that long-unfinished pile of concrete on the corner of Snow Hill.

This is testimony to how successive generations of planners have failed to appreciate Pugin’s genius, whose interior work led Sir John Betjeman (1906-84) to say: “Inside it fairly takes the breath away: it soars to the heavens and its long thin pillars are like being in a mighty forest.”

Never mind the fact that when St Chad’s was built between 1838 and 1841 it was the first Catholic cathedral to be built in this country since the 16th century Reformation.